Seated on a camp chair under a coconut palm
tree on the shore of Hilo Bay, Hawaii, opposite Coconut Island, I began typing
my first book. The year was 1933, and I was twenty-two years old. My desk
was a fruit crate which reposed a seventeen-dollar portable typewriter. The
manuscript was titled The Glory Hole, and it described realistically
and saucily the life of a deck boy aboard a seagoing Matson Line sugar freighter.
I intended it to be my passport into the literary world of Alec Waugh and
W. Somerset Maughham, but the Writer in the Sky intended otherwise. The yellowing
manuscript is still in my file.

Other attempts as writing books met the same fate:
a narrative about a rowboat trip on the Yukon River, a church history essay
titled Pioneers of Faithin Action, and even a doctoral
dissertation that won a degree but failed to make it into print.

Not until twenty-six years had passed did my first
genuine, authentic, professional hardback come off the press of Harper &
Brothers in 1959. Its title? Crusade at the Golden Gate. Its subject?
Billy Graham. Who marketed it? Friends of Billy Graham. On the flyleaf Billy
wrote, "To Sherwood Wirt, with deep appreciation for this contribution to
our ministry and the Kingdom of God. Billy Graham,

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Philippians 1:6." Norman Vincent Peale wrote me that he considered
it the finest book written about Billy to date.

So began at long last a literary career that under
God has included writing and publishing over two dozen books, editing many
others, and producing a magazine for Billy Graham that set records in Christian
publishing, while expanding its own outreach to ten issues in five foreign
languages (French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese) and
Braille.1

During Decision's first year of publication,
our growth was phenomenal, but so were my editorial problems. Good contemporary
material, I discovered, was hard to find. Writers were inundating us with
testimonies, poetry, and stories about their hospital stays, but it was mostly
unusable.

In December 1961, three Minnesota writers invited
my wife and me to accompany them to a Christian writer's conference in Chicago,
and I came back with a secret agenda. It was to establish a writers' seminar
that would teach God's people how to write top-grade, highly readable material
for the market, including Decision. And there was something
more.

In meeting with writers and aspiring writers, I had
made a pitiful discovery. Many of them were making the same mistakes in dealing
with publishers that I had made for twenty-five years. Thanks to Billy Graham,
I had learned at last how a writer can get his or her material into print,
and I wanted to share that with them. Especially I wanted them to stop wasting
their time and postage sending off manuscripts to unknown
outlets.

In January 1962, Billy summoned his team to a meeting
at the Biltmore Terrace Hotel in Miami Beach, and I was included. When my
turn came to give a brief report of my ministry, I told the team my plan
while I stood facing Billy. I said the devotional material being submitted
to us at Decision was not what the Christians I knew wanted to read
in the 1960s. They wanted fresh, lively, captivating articles and testimonies
that reflected scriptural truth, that were not above using humor, and that
spoke directly to the reader's condition with a victorious message of faith
and hope and love.

Then I said that I wanted to inaugurate a school
of Christian

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writing that would produce writers who would contribute choice
material to our magazine. I proposed to hold it at the Billy Graham headquarters
in Minneapolis. As I sat down, I noticed that Billy was smiling.

Later I spoke to him, and he said simply, "Draw up
a plan and send it to me." I soon learned that Billy was different from other
evangelists in one significant way: he understood the value of the written
word in bringing people to Christ. He was not solely verbal, or as Disraeli
said of Gladstone, "inebriated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity."

Billy Graham was in fact deeply committed to literary
evangelism and had already written Peace with God and The Secret of Happiness,
two excellent books that became bestsellers and were translated into
scores of languages, including Russian. His crusade sermons and radio messages
were also printed and mailed out daily as tracts, and he was starting a daily
syndicated column titled "My Answer," which still appears today in many
newspapers.

Here is a partial list of Billy's books to
date:

America's Hour of Decision,
1951

Peace with God,
1953

The Secret of Happiness,
1955

My Answer,
1960

World Aflame,
1965

The Challenge,
1969

The Jesus Generation,
1971

Angels,
1975

How to Be Born Again,
1977

The Holy Spirit,
1978

Till Armageddon,
1981

Approaching Hoofbeats,
1983

A Biblical Standard for Evangelists,
1984

Unto the Hills,
1986

Facing Death and the Life After,
1987

Answers to Life's Problems,
1988

Hope for the Troubled Heart, 1991

Storm Warning,
1992

Just As I am
(Memoirs), 1997

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It was Billy's determination to proclaim the Gospel
by the written word that brought into being Christianity Today and
Decision. Not every evangelist has chosen the literary route. Some
seem to have a great reluctance to sit down and write a paragraph. Life for
them is verbal rather than literary. They listen to tapes, but read few books
other than the Bible. They quote to me Paul's remark in his letter to the
Romans: "How shall they hear without a
preacher?"2

I agree that Paul certainly favored preaching, and
yet I remind writers that it is what Paul wrote, rather than what
he preached verbally, that has come down to us. He himself admitted that
his letters were more powerful than his sermons. Perhaps he knew  certainly
the Holy Spirit knew  that if it were not for the written word of
Scripture, today's church would have nothing to preach. Preaching is vital
 always has been and always will be until Jesus returns. Electronics
have augmented preaching and made it even more significant. But we should
never underestimate the power of the written word.

When I returned to Minneapolis, I found that not
everyone at the Billy Graham headquarters favored my idea of a school of
writing. We had no dormitory facilities and no auditorium. "Anyway," I was
asked, "what has a writing school to do with evangelism?"

Nevertheless, in July 1963, some ninety writers enrolled
in the first three-day Decision School of Christian Writing. Our Decision
staff made up the entire faculty, with one addition. I read a message
of greetings sent from North Carolina by Billy Graham. We held some workshops
on stairwells and ate meals at odd hours and paid our way. As for those who
attended, they were totally enthusiastic and promised to come back next year,
which they did in large numbers.

A couple of years later, unknown to us, the heiress
to an industrial fortune attended one of our writing schools as a registrant.
We gave her the same courteous treatment we gave everybody who came to the
school. She went home so delighted that when she wrote her thanks, she enclosed
a generous gift to the ministry of the Billy Graham Association. After that
I heard no questions about the evangelistic value of writing seminars! Meanwhile
the Holy Spirit kept blessing the incoming mail departments with new
subscriptions, and

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readers continued to write us saying in different ways that they
had found Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord through the pages of the
magazine. The subscription list to Decision increased until our monthly
press run peaked at 5,285,000 copies, making it the largest Christian magazine
in the world.

In the years since 1963, Christian writing seminars
have burgeoned, spreading over America and the entire world under different
auspices but all serving the same Lord. I have taught such schools in Alaska,
Canada, several countries of Europe, South America, South Africa, and all
around the Pacific Rim. Billy Graham may not fully realize it, but his interest
in literary evangelism was a primary impetus in starting it all.

On an airplane trip from Auckland to Sydney I had
the pleasure of sharing with Ruth and Billy Graham, at their request, some
of the principles I still use in teaching fellow writers. The Grahams, of
course, are both brilliant writers, and each has had an amazing literary
output. I have no doubt that their books will not only be on the shelves
until the Lord returns, but will be taken down and read
repeatedly.

And what is it that I tell Christians who write and
want to become published? I ask four questions:

2. Contacts. Getting into print is like getting
into heaven: It's not what you do; it's whom you know.

3. Discipline. Write something every day.
Then join a critique group and rewrite it.

4. Tools. Whatever you need. Ask your family
to stop giving you neckties and sweaters for Christmas and instead give you
tools for writing.

____________________

1. As this volume indicates, my own life and ministry
for Jesus Christ developed not so much through preaching or churchmanship
as through writing. It is small wonder that I encourage other ministers to
develop their writing skills. The San Diego County Christian Writers' Guild,
which I founded in 1977, is now the largest in North America. My book The
Making of a Writer was published by Augsburg in 1987 and in 1996 appeared
in Spanish.